The Ships of Earth: Homecoming: Volume 3 (36 page)

All the camels were above the floor of the ravine when Issib cried out, “Now! For your lives!” As soon as he saw that Meb and Zdorab both had heard, he turned his own camel and pushed his way in among the pack beasts. However, he could not control his animal forcefully enough to make headway faster than the rest. As Meb overtook him, he reached out and took the reins from Issib’s feeble grasp, then began to drag Issib’s camel faster and faster. Soon, though, they reached a narrow place where the two camels couldn’t pass side by side, especially because of the bulk of Issib’s chair. Without hesitation—without even waiting for his camel to kneel to let him dismount—Meb slid off to the ground, let go of his own camel’s reins, and dragged on the reins of Issib’s mount, hurrying it through the gap.

Moments later, Zdorab came through the same narrow place, then came up beside them. “The Index!” he shouted.

Issib, who couldn’t lift it, pointed to the bag on his lap. “It’s looped to the pommel!” he shouted.

Zdorab maneuvered his animal close; Meb held Issib’s camel steady, deftly Zdorab reached out, unlooped the bag, and then, brandishing it high like a trophy, rode on ahead.

“Leave me now!” Issib shouted at Meb.

Meb ignored him and continued to drag his camel upward, passing the slower pack animals.

Soon they came to a place where Zdorab, Luet, Hushidh, Shedemei, Sevet, and Eiadh waited on foot. Mebbekew realized that he must be near the top now—Zdorab must have left the Index with Volemak, and Rasa and the other women must be keeping the infants on high ground. “Take Issib!” shouted Meb, handing the reins to Zdorab. Then Meb rushed back down the canyon to the next pack beast. He thrust the reins of the animal in Luet’s hands. “Drag him up!” he cried. To each woman in turn he gave the reins of a pack animal. They could hear the water now, a roaring sound; they could feel the rumbling in the earth. “Faster!” he cried.

There were just enough of them to take the reins of all the pack animals. Only Meb’s own mount, now last in line, was untended. She was clearly frightened by the noise of the water, by the shaking of the earth, and didn’t stay close behind. Meb called to her, “Glupost! Come on! Hurry, Glupost!” But he kept tugging on the reins of the last pack animal, knowing that the coldboxes it carried would be more important, in the long run, than his own mount.

“Let go, Meb!” cried Zdorab. “Here it comes!”

They could see the wall of water from where they were, that’s how high it was—higher, in fact, than the top of the ravine, so that they instinctively ran even higher up the slope they were standing on. Those at the top were never in danger of being swept away, though, for the water stayed lower than they were.

However, the water that was snagged into the side canyon they had climbed through shot up into it with such
force that it rose higher than the main body of the water in the ravine. It slammed into the last two camels and then into Meb, lifting them all off their feet and heaving them the rest of the way up the side canyon. Meb could hear women screaming—was that Dol, howling out Meb’s name?—and then he felt the water subsiding almost as fast as it had risen, sucking him downward. For a moment he thought of letting go of the reins and saving himself; then he realized that the pack camel had braced itself and was now more secure on the ground than Meb himself. So he clung to the reins and was not swept away. But as he hung there, pressed against the side of the camel that he had saved, and which was now saving him, he saw his mount Glupost get dragged off her feet and sucked down into the maelstrom in the ravine.

In moments, he felt many hands on him, prying the reins from his fingers, leading him, sopping wet and trembling, up to where the others waited. Volemak embraced him, weeping. “I thought I had lost you, my son, my son.”

“What about Elya?” wailed Eiadh. “How could he save himself from that?”

“Not to mention Vas,” said Rasa softly.

Several people looked at Sevet, whose face was hard and set.

“Not everyone shows fear the same way,” murmured Luet, putting an end to any hard judgments anyone might be inclined to make about the difference between Eiadh’s and Sevet’s reaction. Luet knew well that Sevet had little reason to care much whether Vas lived or died—though she wondered how much Sevet herself actually knew.

What was most in Luet’s heart was the fact that Nafai was also not with them. He and Obring were almost certainly on high ground, and safe. But they would no doubt be deeply worried.

Tell him that we’re safe, she said silently to the Oversoul. And tell
me
—is Elemak alive? And Vas?

Alive, came the answer in her mind.

She said so.

The others looked at her, half in relief, half in doubt. “Alive,” she said again. “That’s all the Oversoul told me. Isn’t it enough?”

The water subsided, the level dropping rapidly. Volemak and Zdorab walked down the side canyon together. They found it a tangle of half-uprooted trees and bushes—not even the boulders were where they had been.

But the side canyon was nothing compared to the ravine itself. There was nothing left. A quarter hour ago it had been lush with vegetation—so lush that it was hard to make way through it, and they had often had to lead the camels through the stream itself in order to pass some of the tangles of vegetation. Now the walls of the ravine, from top to bottom, had not a single plant clinging to them. The soil itself had been scoured away, so that bare rock was exposed. And on the floor of the ravine, there were only a few heavy boulders and the sediments left behind by the water as it dropped.

“Look how the floor of the ravine is bare rock near the edges,” said Volemak. “But deep sediment in the middle, near the water.”

It was true: already the stream that remained—larger than the original one—was cutting a channel a meter deep through the thick mud. The new banks of the stream would collapse here and there, a few meters of mud slipping down into the water. It would take some time before the floor of the ravine stabilized.

“It’ll be green as ever within six weeks,” said Zdorab. “And in five years you’d never know this happened.”

“What do you think?” asked Volemak. “If we stay to the edges, is it safe to use this as a highway down to the sea?”

“The reason we were using the ravine in the first place was because Elemak said the top was not possible—it keeps getting cut by deep canyons or blocked by steep hills.”

“So we keep to the edges,” said Volemak. “And we hope.”

It took a while at the top of the ravine to check the camels’ loads and be sure nothing had come loose during
the scramble to safety. “It’s better than we could have hoped, that we lost only the one camel,” said Volemak.

Zdorab led his own mount forward, and held out the reins to Meb.

“No,” said Meb.

“Please,” said Zdorab. “Every step I take on foot will be my way of giving honor to my brave friend.”

“Take it,” whispered Volemak.

Meb took the reins from Zdorab. “Thank you,” he said. “But there were
no
cowards here today.”

Zdorab embraced him quickly, then went back to help Shedemei get the women with babies onto their camels.

It turned out that neither Zdorab nor Meb nor Volemak did much riding the rest of that day. They spent their time on foot, patrolling the length of the caravan, making sure the camels never strayed toward the thick and treacherous mud in the middle of the ravine. They had visions of a camel sinking immediately over its head. The footing was wet, slimy, and treacherous, but by keeping the pace slow, they soon reached the mouth of the ravine, where it emptied into a wide river.

There had obviously been much damage here, too, for the opposite side of the river valley was a mess of mud and boulders, with many trees knocked down and much bare soil and rock exposed. And the rest of the way down the river they could see that both banks had been torn apart. Ironically, though, because the force of the flood had been less intense here than in the ravine, their passage through the debris it left behind would be far harder.

“This way!”

It was Elemak, with Vas behind him. The two of them were on foot, but they could see that their camels were not far behind. They were on higher ground. It would be a steep but not very difficult climb to reach them.

“We have a path here through the high ground!” called Elemak.

In a few minutes they were gathered at the beginning of Elemak’s path through the forest. As husbands and wives embraced, Issib noticed that the forest here was considerably
less dense than it had been higher up the mountain. “We must be near sea level now,” he said.

“The river makes a sharp bend to the west over there,” said Vas, one arm around Sevet, his baby held against his shoulder. “And from there you can see the Scour Sea. Between this river and the one to the south it’s open grassland, mostly, a few trees here and there. Higher ground, thank the Oversoul. We felt the earthquakes, but when they passed we didn’t think anything of them, except to worry that it might have been worse up where you were. Then suddenly Elya insisted we needed to go to the higher ground and look over the area, and just as we got there we heard this roaring noise and the river went crazy. We had images of seeing all the camels floating by, with all of you still riding on top of them.”

“Issib was warned through the Index,” said Volemak.

“It’s a good thing we
weren’t
all together,” said Issib. “Four more camels, and we would have lost them. As it was, Meb lost his mount—because he was saving pack animals, I might add.”

“We can wait for the stories until we’re at our camp for the night,” said Elemak. “We can reach the place between rivers before nightfall. There’s little moon, so we want to have the tents up before dark.”

That night they stayed up late around the fire, partly because they were waiting for dinner to cook, partly because they were too keyed-up to sleep, and partly because they kept hoping that Nafai and Obring would find the camp that night. That was when the stories were told. And as Hushidh bade Luet goodnight in the tent where she would be sleeping alone with her baby, she said, “I wish you could see as I see, Luet. That flood did what nothing else could have managed—the bonds between us all are so much stronger. And Meb . . . the honor that flows to him now ...”

“A nice change,” said Luet.

“I just hope he doesn’t strut too much about it,” said Hushidh, “or he’ll waste it all.”

“Maybe he’s growing up,” said Luet.

“Or maybe he just needed the right circumstance to discover the best in himself. He didn’t hesitate, Issya says. Just dismounted and risked his own life dragging Issib to safety.”

“And Zdorab took the Index, and then led us back down . . .”

“I know, I’m not saying Meb was the only one. But you know how it is with Zdorab. That gesture he made, giving his mount to Meb. It was a generous thing to do, and it helped bind the group together—but it also had the effect of erasing the memory of Zdorab’s own role in saving us. Our minds were all on Mebbekew.”

“Well, maybe that’s how Zodya wants it,” said Luet.

“But
we
won’t forget,” said Hushidh.

“Hardly,” said Luet. “Now go to bed. The babies won’t care how little sleep we got tonight—they’ll be starving on schedule in the morning.”

It was only a few hours after dawn when Nafai and Obring returned. They had been far from the flood, of course, but they had also been on the wrong side of it, so that coming home they had to find a place to cross either the ravine itself or the river. They ended up dragging the camels across the river upstream of the ravine, making a long detour around the worst of the destruction, and then crossing the river in shallow marshes and sand bars near the sea—at low tide. “The camels are getting less and less happy about crossing water,” said Nafai.

“But we brought back two deers,” said Obring happily.

With everyone reunited, Volemak made a little speech establishing this place as their campsite. “The river to the north we will name Oykib, for the firstborn boy of this expedition, and the river to the south is Protchnu, for the firstborn boy of the next generation.”

Rasa was outraged. “Why not name them Dza and Chveya, for the first two
children
born on our journey?”

Volemak looked at her steadily without answering.

“Then we had better leave this place before the boys are old enough to know how you have honored them solely because they have penises.”

“If we had had only two girls, and two rivers, Father would have named the rivers for
them
,” said Issib, trying to make peace.

They knew it wasn’t true, of course. For several weeks after they got there, Rasa insisted on calling them the North River and the South River; Volemak was just as adamant in calling them the River Oykib and the River Protchnu. But since it was the men who did more traveling, and therefore crossed the rivers more often, and fished in them, and had to tell each other about places and events up and down the rivers’ lengths, it was the names Oykib and Protchnu that stayed. Whether anyone else noticed or not, however, Luet saw that Rasa never used Volemak’s names for the rivers, and grew silent and cold whenever others spoke their names.

Only once did Nafai and Luet discuss the matter. Nafai was singularly unsympathetic. “Rasa didn’t mind when women decided everything in Basilica, and men weren’t even allowed to
look
at the lakes.”

“That was a holy place for women. The only place like it in the world.”

“What does it matter?” said Nafai. “It’s just a couple of names for a couple of rivers. When we leave here, no one else will ever remember what we named them.”

“So why not North River and South River?”

“It’s only a problem because Mother made it a problem,” said Nafai. “Now let’s
not
make it a problem between
us
.”

“I just want to know why
you
go along with it!”

Nafai sighed. “Think, for just a moment, what it would mean if I had called them the North and South rivers. What it would have meant to Father. And to the other men. Then it really
would
have been divisive. I don’t need anything more to separate me from the others.”